People are complicated. We function as individuals and also collectively in interconnected social systems. This interconnectedness lies at the heart of product design because, if we don’t pay attention to it, it leads to unintended consequences.

This is why it is fundamentally important that every stakeholder involved in the product design process (just about everyone in your company) should have a shared awareness of common concepts that can help us to navigate this minefield of socio-technical complexity. Let’s start with a simple example of a typical internal pitfall that can ultimately contribute to product dysfunction.

Goodhart’s Law

I was meeting with a customer experience team and a third party survey company and we were discussing a list of proposed customer satisfaction survey questions, in particular the Net Promoter Score (NPS) question:

"On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?"

The survey expert told the CX team to put that question at the very top, because, she said “Customers give a higher score if this question is asked first.” Fair enough. However, in whose interest is a higher NPS? The purpose of this metric is to help the business improve its ability to serve its customers needs, so why would the business want to employ any tactic that could artificially inflate this score?

In this case, there was an obvious answer: By executive order, the single metric by which their entire business unit would be measured was achieving an NPS above a certain threshold. This would impact everyone’s performance rating as well as their bonuses.

The desire to improve NPS stemmed from the best intentions of improving the customer experience but the measure chosen was misguided because this type of metric can be manipulated in multiple ways and the company had given its employees a powerful incentive to do so.

Conway’s Law

A simple example of Conway’s law at work is common to certain corporate websites. Imagine you visit the website of a large financial services provider to open a bank account. On the homepage you expect to see something like:


Bank Accounts | Investment | Insurance


Instead you are presented with the following:


XBank | SuperBank | SuperYou | UltraVest | Investo | MegaSure | Gr8Sure


I changed the names to protect the innocent but this is not too far removed from a real world example that I encountered.

What’s going on here? This is an example of extreme siloing where independent business verticals (sometimes actively competing with each other) have become so misaligned that their key stakeholders have effectively presented the businesses products to customers as a mirror of the internal organizational disconnectedness. Each vertical owner has been allowed to simply stake their claim to a portion of the homepage real estate. The end result is a site that is disjointed and difficult to use. How could they have missed the obvious solution for customers instead of presenting the internal status quo to an external audience?

Conway's Law shows how the way that people and teams are organized can impact the design and functionality of the technology they produce. By emphasizing the interconnectedness of technology and people, it becomes easier to see how socio-technical concepts play a critical role in the success of innovation and digital product design.

The Hawthorne Effect

In product design, this can happen when users are aware that they're being studied, and they may behave differently than they would in a natural setting. A good example is when participants all gave positive feedback, because they didn't want to hurt the feelings of the product developers who were present during the session.

Another example from my own experience, was the discovery that less sophisticated customers are prone to give positive feedback in the hope of attaining better personal loans, mistakenly thinking that the rating they give a lending app will somehow impact them personally.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Charles Darwin famously said: "Ignorance breeds confidence more often than knowledge". The fact is that we are all guilty of this at some point! In big companies, this can be a problem when senior stakeholders involved in the product development process think they know what users need, trusting hunches over proper research.

A good example of this effect is when a stakeholder insists that a specific design pattern employed in an app they like should be employed in a new product without necessarily validating that it is fit for purpose. It’s crucial to factor rigorous user feedback and testing into the product design process.

The Law of Triviality

In product development, this can happen when teams spend too much time debating minor details or features, while neglecting the overall customer problem. It's important to keep the big picture in mind and prioritize the most important aspects of the product, while not getting bogged down in trivial details. The best solution is to align all stakeholders around a single shared problem statement and work your way from there towards a minimum viable product that solves for it.

For legacy companies, creating successful products that make customers happy is especially tough. Product design and development are complex processes that are influenced by various internal and external factors. It's important to be aware of potential biases, pitfalls, and blind spots to ensure the creation of products that truly meet customers' real needs. Failing to consider these factors can result in products that miss the mark, leaving customers frustrated and disappointed.

Fortunately, there has been a massively increased awareness within business and many companies are getting better at wrangling these issues by putting methodologies and people in place to help them reach customers by building the right things right in the right ways.